Second Reading
Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (14:50): I am pleased to rise to speak a little on the bail laws being brought through by a government that has been dragged kicking and screaming on this issue, one that does not worry about ‘set and forget’. It was set and forget last year, and it was set and forget the year before. They did not actually do anything to address the issues that they caused with those bail laws, despite the fact the opposition and many others in the community told them time and time again that what the government had done in weakening our bail laws would actually lead to consequences.
Consequences are something I want to talk about, because the problem that we have had in our community in the past couple of years in particular – particularly with youth and particularly with home invasions, carjackings and the like – is that there have not been consequences. We have heard the stories. We have seen the stories in the paper. Indeed, I can inform the house of a young person in my own electorate who police tell me has been charged and bailed around 50 times – and that has been reported for other individuals in the Herald Sun. This is happening time and time again. Not only that, we actually had one individual on social media actively bragging that he could steal a car, drive it at 200 k’s an hour and cause damage and cause a threat to community safety but that he was going to get away with it because he would just get bailed even if he did get caught. That is the issue that Victorians are raising with us. They are saying the problem is there are no consequences.
No-one on this side wants us to be locking up kids. But when you have got kids, whether they are 14 or 17½, who are repeatedly causing trouble in the community and committing crimes – serious crimes like carjackings and aggravated burglary, coming into a house with a machete or a knife or a baseball bat and stealing people’s vehicles, going on joy rides and the like – that has to have some consequences, and under the changes that the government has made in the past couple of years to bail those consequences have been removed. As the member for Malvern quite rightly said, we should remember bail is a privilege, not a right.
We have said in here before that we should not be locking up people for minor offences, that we should not be locking up people for a long period of time if they are charged with a crime that would not result in a long custodial sentence anyway. But we must be able to send a signal to the community, and most particularly to the crooks and the criminals and the thugs that are terrorising many of our neighbourhoods, that you cannot just keep doing this and get away with it. That is the problem.
The government removed, and is now making a big deal about reintroducing, the crime of breaching a bail condition. But it is reintroducing it as a summary offence when previously it was an indictable offence – a much higher level and one that required therefore the courts to consider a much higher threshold when it came to addressing bail. The fact that these laws in this respect do not apply to minors – what are we doing it for? As I have just said, much of the community angst and much of the worry from the community is in fact about minors. It is about the 14- to 17½-year-old kids. It is not restricted to that, by all means, but in these cases many of them are teenagers. If these new laws do not apply to minors, then that is a serious, serious concern.
The member for Malvern also outlined other failings in what is not in this legislation – that is, things like the tougher test for magistrates to consider, that they must have a high degree of confidence that an offender will not reoffend. It is not actually even in this legislation. Likewise there is the fact that although this legislation is urgent, there is a default commencement date of 29 September.
We certainly will not be opposing this legislation; an improvement is better than nothing. But we still think there are issues, and we will have more to say about that in the other place, where we have the opportunity to look at amendments. We do need tougher bail laws. Unfortunately, we are not convinced that the government will get them right. I am going to leave my contribution there to ensure that we have more time for members on this side to have a bit of debate, given that this bill is being guillotined at 5 o’clock tonight.